You don’t understand RNG, nor how Diablo 4 loot drops or has ever dropped in the history of the game.
Absolutely they could but it would be horrible for the game.
Because enchanting can cost you millions of currency and tempering is practically free. The limit to tempering is precisely because it’s bad design to make every system limited through ever increasing scaled costs. IMO they need to put a hard cap on enchanting too.
But did they actually lose anything? I feel like 3GAs are all over the place and there’s always multiple of the desired ones I want up for trade. I see more offers to get 3GA items now than I ever did for a 4/4 item before. So why is it such a big deal if they’re so plentiful? Forget the math saying they’re common, trades tell us they’re pretty common. So why can’t people recognize they didn’t really lose much? In fact, they didn’t lose anything because the item wasn’t actually the thing they think they lost.
It doesn’t matter. Even if you lost the item, it is a video game, and since it is a virtual item: you would not lose anything. No matter how false is what you’re losing, you feel it anyway.
That is why is “such a big deal”.
One “answer” to this problem is to teach the player that he hasn’t lost much, but that is much harder. NO ONE is going to listen to you if you tell them “you feel the wrong way”. The only way to do it is to train that person’s brain over years to condition it to think about it in a specific way. That’s why old ARPG players often (not always) greet the trash with a smile. And that’s why I know I won’t be able to change your mind. You’re also not going to listen if I tell you “you feel the wrong way”.
Ah the good old: “You know nothing John Snow” mentality. There is a pretty high probability that i played more Diablo games combined than your time spent on this earth since you first touched a keyboard.
And you see…there it is…there you have just solved the issue with tempering having a max number of tries and how to get rid of it. See? Easy.
But putting a hard cap on enchanting would literally kill the game. Ever wondered why there was none in D3 neither?
wrong. If the only way to progress is RNG tempering its just another korean mmo. You should never be able to brick an item that took you hours to find.
Tempering is a system that has a significant chance of failure built into the system. The chance of failure is far beyond any other system we have in the game.
And that makes it a feels-bad system more often than a feels-good system.
While enchanting is the same kind of system, at least it is up to the player to decide when to give up, not a hard limit on the number of tries.
Also, item enhancement starts with the drop and only ends when masterworked. When a good item drops, that is already the “success”. So bricking that item in tempering becomes a “fail after succeeding” event, which feels bad.
I think ultimately, the problem is that this is an added-on system. We are already used to an item being good when it drops as a good item. Tempering now adds a chance to trash that item afterwards, so it can feel like the limit on tempering attempts feels like the system was put in to “take something away from us”.
No it wouldnt spark joy in just anyone. Any sane person understands that an item with only 3 out of 5 stats is not a great item. Its a good start, but way to early for your joy.
So an item with 3 perfect Greater Affixes would not produce “joy” in anyone…
I don’t know about you, but I feel good when an item have the correct affixes, even if they are not GA.
Maybe “joy” is not the right word, but I’m pretty sure that no sane person wouldn’t be excited by the possibility of a perfect item.
I don’t know… maybe all the posts complaining about Tempering and those supporting the complaints are all crazy… but it’s extremely unlikely. (Let’s be honest, this proves that you’re clearly wrong about that only a sane person would understand. You can’t call so many people insane without appearing insane yourself.)
It’s not a great item, it’s a great potential good item. It’s exciting to think about the possibilities. It’s a great moment because you are very close to getting what you want. You hype yourself up, and you build expectations.
It’s a moment in time when your mind can’t stop thinking about how good it would be if you were successful.
And it is the perfect time for “a disappointment” to destroy you.
It’s literally an “expectation versus reality” moment.
And it is you, and only you, who presses the button that decides everything.
(Obviously all this happens in just seconds or fractions of a second. It’s not an out-of-this-world experience, but it’s what happens in the heads of everyone who feels bad after failing a Tempering. I wrote it in this way to make it easy to put yourself in that person’s shoes… to evoke the same feeling)
I’m so turned off by it the only reason I used it was I felt I needed every scrap of power to push into WT4.
I mean I’m so lackadaisical about min-maxing that I just look at the fifth roll and say “whatever” and equip it anyway, but I get the feeling that isn’t how it’s supposed to work.
Also notably I haven’t found anything truly good yet, so all I’m doing is messing around with sacred items pretty much just because they are sacred items. Once I have a mess of ancestral items and am actually looking for certain stats, my guess is I won’t want to participate at all and if I do, it will be more “whatevers” from me.
I don’t produce dopamine (it’s inhibited by meds) so I literally feel nothing when I roll well. I feel bad when I roll bad, but then I say whatever and equip it anyway. RNG is not for me, I came up on 8 bit games that if they had RNG it was like “does the enemy drop 5 currency, one currency, a heart, or maybe three hearts” and every single other thing was deterministic.
I played wow for almost 16 years but I always went for the deterministic gear be it crafting or catchup. Any time I tried to do LFR where gear only has a chance to drop, I hated it. I might have the record for longest playing the game without ever engaging in RNG content other than the absolute bare minimum and even then three LFRs in a row with no item and I’d never do it again. I would do dungeons and like that purely for fun, I don’t recall ever actually using RNG to gear my character.
“Maybe D4 isn’t the game for you.” Yeah, yeah, but I paid 70 bucks for it and I still enjoy the deterministic parts of it like leveling and questing. I just don’t care all that much about my gear, in fact I’m not even sure I’d know what a truly good piece of gear looks like. I only read maxroll so that I can deterministically squeeze power out of my build without totally relying on gear. Other than that as long as it’s not full of resistance affixes it’s usually good enough for me. I do know what an upgrade looks like but the loot hunt is probably the least important part of the game for me, albeit I only play maybe two hours a week.
All of these solutions boil down to: “give us more power for less effort”. But as soon as they do that we get the complaint that there’s nothing to do in the game because the item chase has ended too early.
The current cost for resetting tempering on an item is finding another copy of the item. But solutions such as the one you linked ask for the cost to be reduced to finding a few rare items. Change it to unlimited and adjust the probabilities and costs appropriately (so it is power-neutral) and it simply becomes a frustrating tedium of sitting in front of the blacksmith trying over and over.
If you treat the system as one that exists to guarantee you a specific affix, then there will be more “feels bad” than “feels good” because you are treating the good outcome as the default. I think the large number of rerolls you currently get is one reason for this.
I have a suggestion here: Color-based tempering that attempts to shift some of the RNG back onto the drop without making drops themselves overly complicated. I think something along these lines would be a better solution than unlimited rerolls.
Of course, if you want to remove the “feels bad”, then you have to design the manuals so that the worst outcomes are still useful for the build that wants the best outcomes. If they did that, then they could make the very powerful affixes rarer (and make it clear that they are rare) so that people don’t assume those affixes are the default.
To answer your original question, yes it feels good to hit the temper you want. It feels good because I have had the experience of missing it. I’ve had several moments where a temper failed and I had to decide whether the item was still worth it. I ended up going with a 2-weapon setup specifically to allow me to get the weapon temper I need on at least one of them as I was leveling. I have kept items long past their item power level because the temper on them was good and I kept missing it on new gear. But getting that better item that then hits the tempers is an awesome moment.
It’s a mindset issue. It’s like being devastated every time a scratch-off seems to be going well and then fails to win you $1M. The best solution is to smooth out the manuals, not to make it so that every scratch-off pays $1M.
give player mechanism to reset durability (repair horadric Malus?)
If PTR players thought bricking would be fun, I don’t think they felt the pain since PTR progression is throw away. They didn’t fully comprehend what it means to brick 2 or 3 GA items.
Options “3.X” are not mine.
Mine seeks a greater effort in exchange for not feeling bad while preserving the original mechanics for everyone who enjoys it.
Correct. We all know that. The point is that it doesn’t feel good. It’s as simple as that.
No, remember that what is proposed is an ADDITIONAL alternative method.
The idea is that if you can’t stand failing or losing the item, then you have an option.
An option that does not imply failure. A slow but safe option.
I agree, if you expect to fail, you feel good about succeeding, BUT very few assume that they will fail. And the reason is that you don’t want to fail. It’s hard to think that you’re going to fail.
Fair enough. That’s all I ask for.
YES. And it is very hard to convince someone to change their mindset. I know I can’t convince almost anyone who likes Tempering that it’s bad, and I know that almost no one who doesn’t enjoy it is going to stick around long enough to like it.
Option 2 in the post you linked suggests increasing the cost by 5x to 10x instead of costing a reroll and increasing it 20x to let you choose your affix. But the cost right now is 5 tempering rerolls per identical item drop. That’s the most important part of the cost. So increasing the negligible materials cost of tempering in exchange for not spending rerolls would be a dramatic power increase.
For it to be slower than finding more items with identical stats, you would have to require a material that is rarer than the item itself. I’m sure you could set a gold cost that would be that, but it would be in the 100s of millions, and even that would be trivialized by later in a season.
Short answer, yes. Still feel this way. It’s a 3 month- ish season. I am fine being at 80% or so max capability for now and chasing things for the remainder of the season.
It also feels bad to die, to lose cinders, to have to fight a boss fight over because you died. Removing all feels-bad moments from the game shouldn’t be a design goal. The ability to fail is what makes it fun to succeed.
Yes, it is just an example, I would not complain if it is greater.
Nobody complained in the thread so I thought it was clear. I’ll edit it so it doesn’t create confusion.
And I’m completely fine with that.
My bad luck for sure will makes me take much longer than usual anyway.
I prefer not to risk it.
If you feel lucky, well… no one would stop you from taking the fast route.
And remind me how many people complain about the one-shot Boss mechanics… yes, a few…
The problem is that Tempering feels like a disconnect in HC. It’s not that you’re a bad player, it’s that your bad luck or the game decided that you had to fail.
Jury is still out for me. At first it didn’t feel so good and I basically did the bare minimum to get something on my gear to get to masterworking.
But now that I’m pushing higher pit levels and trying to squeeze out the extra DPS having to I’m looking at what tempering I can change. The difference is now 2 weeks into the season I have multiple backups of gear in my stash so as I’m working on those tempering recipes bricking an item doesn’t feel as bad when I have 5 more viable items next in line.
So where I’m starting to lean towards is bricking is annoying but still superior to the old system where I’d go for a month and not get that 3/4 item I wanted.
I think the only way to fix this is to make the best rolls in tempering very rare, so that no one can view them as the default. That only works if you make the other rolls worth more than 0, but I think that would be a better way to design the manuals anyway. Not “manual of random fire skills” but “manual of incinerate” & “manual of fireball” & “manual of meteor”, etc.
You didn’t comment on my suggestion about color-coding the temper affixes and then having items drop with a colored slot, so that you could choose to add the temper of that color from whichever manual. I think this (+the rarities) would solve the mindset problem by shifting more of the RNG to the item drop.
